


Prowl

by Punk_B1rd



Category: Original Work
Genre: Mimic, Minor Character Death, Modern Setting, Monsters, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 03:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17195687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punk_B1rd/pseuds/Punk_B1rd
Summary: When Rosie Mills inherits an old looking chest from her estranged grandmother, she assumes it to be just another thing to deal with on her already full plate of things to deal with. It won't open and no key will fit the lock. Not even manhandling it will open it. Perhaps a little patience will convince the old chest to reveal it's secrets. Or kicking it. Who knows?





	Prowl

**Author's Note:**

> This is a secret Krampus gift for a friend on Discord! I hope you like it!! Maybe I'll write more about these two in the future..! I really enjoyed writing this. Even if I did wait until the last minute to do so.  
> My prompt was: "Beasts, werewolves, demons, tentacle, teeth, tongues, drool almost all things monsterish." No demons or werewolves, but I got most all of the other ones! <3  
> (This work is un-beta'ed. Sorry for any typos or other issues..!)
> 
> Cheers and Happy Christmas!
> 
> Punk

Prowl.

With one final grunt of effort, Rosie finally finished lugging the stupid chest up the stairs and shoved it through the door of her single room studio apartment. “I hope you’re worth the trouble.” She huffs and grumbles, working on pushing it up against the wall next to her tiny desk. Whatever her now deceased grandmother had thought was so important inside the sturdy and heavy wood and steel chest had clearly been worth expressly leaving it to her only granddaughter. So maybe it would be worth it....if she could only get it open. Not even her uncle, who had tried to pry it open with a crowbar could get the thing to budge. After grunting and straining for about an hour, he had sheepishly given up and helped her load it into her car. “Sorry honey. I’m sure you can figure it out. You’re a smart kid.” He had told her. 

Like most of her problems, Rosie pushed it to the back of her mind and decided pizza and The Office was a much better way to kill the rest of her Friday night. 

A few hours later, half of a pizza gone and The Office still playing quietly on the small laptop next to the pizza box on the coffee table and Rosie was down and out for the count. It had been such a long day, helping her family clear out her grandmother’s old house, sorting out belongings and claiming whatever grandma Mollie had willed to them. As Rosie snoozed in the flickering light of her laptop screen, the old chest in the corner gave a heavy click and the lid popped open. With a soft creak, the lid opened a fraction wider, allowing a shadowy black tendril to blindly reach out from the dark depths of the chest and touch along the floor. Seeming to sense the remaining pizza, no longer warm but still very much tasty, the tendril poked its way further until it gently bumped one of the legs of the coffee table. It crept it’s way up until it could wander through the various odds and ends littered across the short little table until it breached the open pizza box. Greedily, the tendril wound itself around the remaining pizza and slowly retracted all the way back to it’s point of origin. The chest’s lid opened further to accept the pizza, now revealing a frightening row of three inch long teeth along the entirety of the opening, top and bottom. A small string of saliva connecting a top and bottom incisor broke as the pizza disappeared into the depths of the chest, the lid closing and locking itself shut once more. 

About a minute later, the lid clicked open again and the same tendril crept out. Seeming to remember the path it took before, it found its way to the top of the table, but wandered past the now empty pizza box to the laptop still autoplaying. With a gentle push, the laptop closed and both silence and darkness followed. The only thing to break the silence for the rest of the night was the soft click of the chest as it retreated into itself and clicked shut. 

Morning was a barely conscious affair as Rosie groaned and forced her tired body to detach itself from the couch and stumble into the bathroom to pee and shower. Not at the same time. 

Washing up in ten minutes and then dissociating for an hour helped much with her state of wakefulness and after combing out her hair and throwing on clean clothes, she wandered out to the front room to find breakfast. The thought of delicious cold breakfast pizza had been the only motivator she could find to finally get out of the warm shower. 

“Where the fuck is my pizza?”

Rosie gawked at the empty Dominos box. She could have sworn she’d left half of a pizza. But maybe she hadn’t? After a bit of searching, she confirmed unhappily that there in fact was no more pizza left. With an unhappy grumble, she retrieved herself a bowl of somewhat stale Lucky Charms, with milk and disappointment. Plopping herself onto the couch, she set the bowl on top of the closed pizza box to eat, finding herself staring mindlessly at the chest resting innocently against the wall opposite her. Oh yeah. She had to try and figure out how to open it soon. What good was a locked chest? It was only taking up space at this point and in her tiny apartment, space was a precious commodity. 

Halfway through her bowl, a knock at the door interrupted her thoughts on how exactly to tackle the chest problem. Finishing her bite, she stood up and headed towards the door. 

“Hello miss! My name is Joseph Moors with Joe’s Doors, how are you today?”

Oh no…. Solicitors. First the missing pizza, now this? Is this how her Saturday was going to go? Rosie forced herself to take a deep breath and quickly banished the thought of straight up slamming the door in this dude’s face. He’s just doing his job. She reminded herself as she let him talk and finish his spiel. The second she heard a lull in his speech, she interrupted him. “Yeah, uh… See, I’m not really interested. But thank you. Sorry.” She shook her head and gritted her teeth, ignoring the solicitor’s protests as she slowly closed the door on him. 

Watching through the peephole, she waited until he left before locking the door and turning away to finish her now probably soggy cereal. 

But when she turned around, her bowl of cereal was no longer on the coffee table. In fact, it was currently being lifted off the table and towards the mystery chest by a dark, shadowy tentacle thing, into the open...mouth..? Open lid?? Of the chest itself. She felt frozen in place as she watched the monstrosity carefully pour both cereal and milk into its gaping, fang riddled mouth. A second, smaller tendril joined the other to carefully pluck the spoon from the bowl and what could only be described as a massive, wet, pink tongue stretched upward to lick a single marshmallow stuck to the back of the spoon. The almost politeness of the whole thing was what snapped her out of her shock and daze. 

“What the fuck???” Rosie shouted, causing the chest monster thing to startle. Both tendrils dropped the bowl and spoon onto her rug and retreated inside itself before the whole thing slammed shut and locked itself with a firm click. Shock was quickly replaced with anger as she ran over to the chest and gave it a hard kick. 

Bad idea. 

She groaned in pain as she smashed her toes against the solid wood of the chest. “That was my breakfast you stupid...thing!! Ouch... I bet you fucking ate my pizza too huh??” She snapped, standing on one foot as she cradled her injured one. But the chest remained stubbornly silent and locked as tightly as it had been yesterday. 

She continued to glare expectantly at the chest until the throbbing in her foot finally diminished enough for her to stand on it again. It seemed however that the chest wasn’t going to open up again around her anytime soon. She shook her head at it, wondering how someone as short and not scary as herself could actually scare something with that many teeth… She gave a little shudder, remembering how many stupidly long, sharp teeth it actually had. Maybe kicking it was a bad idea in more ways than one. 

Well, if it was going to eat her, it would have by now, she figured. She uncrossed her arms and knelt to pick up the discarded bowl and spoon. “Uh… Hey. Sorry for scaring you. Just uh…. Don’t eat my food without asking. If you’re hungry then you can...let me know...however you want to do that.” She mumbled, watching the chest closely for any signs of movement. But it didn’t budge. Starting to feel stupid for talking to a piece of furniture and starting to wonder if she’d hallucinated the whole thing, she decided to leave it be and do something else productive. Like laundry. 

She deposited the dishes in the sink and made her way around the room, gathering up various dirty clothes and stuffing them into the hamper to take down to the laundry room. She closed the lid to the hamper and hauled it over to the door. Now all that was left was to find her laundry room key and her quarters. Hoping they were where she left them last time, she stepped over to her kitchen, tugging open her junk drawer and starting to dig through it. 

_“You didn’t apologize for kicking me.”_ A very inhuman, neither masculine nor feminine, rumbling voice spoke up from somewhere behind her.

She froze partway through tucking her baggy of quarters into her pocket. Slowly turning, she faced the chest and watched with a mixture of curiosity and slight terror as the chest’s lock clicked and the lid cracked open. 

“W-what..?” She breathed.

_“You apologized for startling me. But you didn’t apologize for kicking me. Or calling me stupid for that matter.”_

She blinked. Oh yeah. She did do that, didn’t she? Damn… Called out by a…whatever it was.  
“Alright… Uh, yeah. Sorry for kicking you. And calling you stupid. That better?” She closed the junk drawer quietly and cautiously approached the chest. She could see the shiny, saliva coated teeth as the chest opened fractionally wider, and a chill ran down her spine. 

_“Well… I suppose that’s okay. Even if the kick was a little overkill.” ___

____

__

Rosie’s brows dipped in the center and she suddenly felt just a little defensive.  
“Hey, in my defense you’re in my home and until a minute ago, I thought you were just a plain old chest my weird estranged grandma left me.” 

_“Mollie was not weird.”_

“My grandma Mollie was a little weird, but that’s beside the point. What even are you anyway?” She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. 

_“My name is Prowl. You can call me whatever you like. I’m what is known commonly as a mimic. We can choose different forms, but a chest is usually the preferred shape. Your grandmother has always had an eye for spotting the magical and mythical, disguised or not. It was a gift. She picked me up at a garage sale about twenty years ago for an embarrassingly low price. Bribed me to open up for slices of melon, then befriended me. She was the first truly kind human I’d ever met. I lived in her front room ever since, by the couch where I could see the television. At least, that was where I lived until she passed.” _The chest, Prowl, paused for a moment, suddenly sounding just a little sad.__

____

____

“Oh… Well. Uh… I’m sorry. You seemed really close to her. Closer than I was.”

 _“Yes. But she did love you. Out of all her children and her children’s children, you were by far her favorite. She saw something in you that she didn’t see in anyone else. Which is why she entrusted me to you.”_ Prowl’s long tongue crept out from between its teeth to moisten it’s fangs with a fresh layer of saliva. Rosie couldn’t bring herself to look away. It was frightening, but almost mesmerizing in a way. 

“Saw something in me? I don’t know about that, but I guess you are technically stuck with me now.” Rosie shrugged. “Though the thing about not stealing my food still stands. Just because it’s not in my hand doesn’t make it free game. Comprende, amigo?” She frowned, and the chest gave an odd little grumbling sound that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle. 

_“Fair enough. But I do get hungry, so don’t forget to toss me something now and again, or I make no promises on the safety of your leftovers.”_

“Deal.” She found herself grinning just a little as she nodded in agreement. Life was about to get just a little more interesting… 

The apartment’s lease agreement did say no pets, but it didn’t say anything about chest shaped mimics with a soft spot for melon.


End file.
